Rogue Pakeha.(Essay)

How not to speak of brothers? Jacques Derrida, Rogues: Two Esssays on Reason.

The tradition of the oppressed teaches us that the 'state of emergency' in which we live is not the exception but the rule, Walter Benjamin, 'On the Concept of History'.

Ahmed

In a state of some desperation several years ago, as I sat down to begin to write what has become this article, I was informed on Radio New Zealand News that Ahmed Zaoui, the Algerian refugee academic who has been granted legal refugee status in New Zealand, had spent five hundred days in solitary confinement in Paremoremo maximum security prison outside Auckland without receiving a fair judicial hearing. He was then to go on to spend a further two months detained in the cells of Auckland Central Remand Prison at Mt Eden, only to be released on bail on 9 December 2004 into the care of Catholic Dominican Friars on the condition that he observe a curfew between 10pm and 6am and report twice a week to the Auckland Central Police Station. As you are reading these words almost three years later, Ahmed Zaoui is still incarcerated there. I say 'incarcerated' because this bail is still a form of detention and it is tenuous. He does not know if or when he might be returned to prison or be taken to the airport in the middle of the night and deported. It is impossible for you, or for I, to comprehend the fear, the frustration, the anguish and, despite his many supporters, the extreme loneliness of Ahmed's isolation.

The 'Zaoui case', as it has come to be known, is the cause of my profound shame as a New Zealander. A shame so deep that I have asked myself if I should leave the country for which on so many different levels--emotional, historical, topographical even--I feel such a profound attachment. Ahmed Zaoui too literally--too close for my comfort--evokes the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben's notion of homo sacer, a man reduced to bare life no longer covered by any legal or civil rights. Agamben argues that a subject whose rights of citizenship have been removed enters a zone of suspension, neither living, in the sense that a political animal lives, in the community and bound by law, nor dead and, therefore, outside human intercourse and the rule of law that constitutes the community of citizens. Agamben writes that, since it underwrites the actual political arrangements in which we live today, we are all potentially exposed to the condition of bare life; it is the contingency into which our political arrangements might dissolve.

You and I, and Ahmed, stand before the law. I want to ask what does standing before the law mean in Aotearoa New Zealand at the beginning of the 21st century? (1)

State of Exception